Halibut on the Moon

by David Vann

  ‘Aquarium is as rich as good poetry and as addictive as a first-class detective novel.’ Spectator

  ‘A triumph.’ Daily Mail

  ‘Vann’s work has a spare, parable-like quality…[He] writes with deft control and a gift for prose propelled as effortlessly as a school of fish.’ Financial Times

  ‘Vann’s provocative prose is filled with a sense of wonder and beauty, even when the lives he describes are tragic.’ LA Times

  ‘David Vann is surely one of the most powerful writers working today.’ New Zealand Herald

  Goat Mountain

  ‘A provocative novel that explores our most primal urges and beliefs, the bonds of blood and religion that define and secure us, and the consequences of our actions. Vann writes with grace and intensity.’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘This story has the power of a bullet fired from a gun.’ Economist

  ‘Muscular, existential, barbaric and dense with allegory… [Vann] is doing something fearless with allegory and character, building a soulless narrator to represent our true nature: primal, instinctual, unapologetic.’ Washington Post

  ‘Brilliant and wise.’ The Times

  ‘For all its unyielding darkness, Goat Mountain is, perhaps perversely, an exhilarating experience. It is, first of all, cathartic in the way of all good tragedies. But it is also exhilarating for the least perverse of reasons: the experience of reading a novelist of David Vann’s rare artistry and vision.’ Observer

  Dirt

  ‘Searing…Vann has an extravagantly literary sensibility, and his novel is full of echoes: One thinks of the stately inevitability of classical tragedy, of Chekhov’s lost souls, of the hallucinatory quality of Faulkner’s rural fantasia, and of Stephen King’s depictions of an unraveling mind.’ Washington Post Book World

  ‘[Vann] is the real thing—a mature, risk-taking and fantastically adept fiction writer who dares to go to the darkest places, explore their most appalling corners.’ Observer

  ‘Vann is a brave writer, daring to write about and depict things that most other authors would baulk at, but that’s what makes him so good—that unflinching eye for the darkness you could potentially find in any of us, given the wrong chain of events.’ Independent

  ‘His language is sharply funny, even as his characters enact a tragedy of Greek proportions.’ New Yorker

  ‘This is a novel of violence, destruction and ruin. There is no salvation. And yet Mr Vann’s soaring writing carries it forward—a reminder of the beauty that can grace even the beastliest things.’ Economist

  ‘Brave and brilliant…Dirt is showing us something unexpected, and unexpectedly stunning…Vann’s details here, as always, are pitch-perfect.’ San Francisco Chronicle

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © David Vann 2019

  The moral right of David Vann to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, 2019

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company, 2019

  Cover design by Erin Fitzsimmons

  Cover photo by Photo Alto/Odilon Dimier/Getty

  ISBN: 9781925773514 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781925774320 (ebook)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia